Can programming courses learn you how to program?

Ok, this is NOT a question. Consider it more as a blog post. I'm not talking about online courses, I'm talking about live courses where you go at classes, do your homework, pay them for teaching you etc. in order to earn some diploma or certificate that will be considered as worthless by any serious company.The answer on question in the title is obvious: No. They can't. How do I know that? I was a teacher on one of those courses for one month. Except, this one was free. The obvious explanation for that is: Those teachers are not competitive enough. And don't buy their bullshit how they have like 5-10 years of experience in IT. It's about what they know now! Their knowledge is most likely obsolete. They can never be as competitive as good programmers that work like 40 h per week. Now, if you say I'm wrong, take a look at latest video I shared on my profile. You think that you will find teacher on some IT academy that can match that guy? Good luck with that! Now, what to do then? All you need, you have online for free. Documentation, videos, books etc. You even have competitive people making videos. Like Adam Bien, Koushik Kothagal, Jirka Pinkas etc. Just save your money, and stop visiting those courses. They lie you and then they will make you to lie yourself.Best regards.

I agree with you for the most part. A lot of times however, I see the things being taught on other sites are the basics of programming in that language. The programming teacher that we would get at our university was a guy that programmed in C# for his main job and came in and taught for a few hours a day.

I am trying to be better at memory management in C++ ; Not just your simple allocation and deallocation but going after memory leaks. I think this is a skill gained from a lot of experience using c++ . I think that I may be able to work with an experienced user and hopefully gain this knowledge quicker.

I never went to private, real life programming courses because the internet had everything for free, so there was no need, however, I do believe it's true what you just said. Some people are really greedy and money hungry (Apple holds the first place but that's irrelevant now). Thanks for the confirmation

Touche. I wasn't really being all that serious. I have nothing against teachers(I almost married one). They work hard, they're under-appreciated and underpaid.

With that said, think about a music teacher versus someone who performs with the Boston Pops. Both are talented but who would you say is better? The teacher or the performer? Don't get me wrong, one is not more important than the other. They're just different. If that makes sense....